An API for Wikipedia

The creator of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, who is now President of the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation, spoke at a Brookings Institute event last week where among other news he discussed their plans for an API. According to one listener's notes: "WPF [Wikipedia Foundation] has early plans to open their API...Problem with open API is cost to dynamically render pages and bandwidth required to deliver content that then is embedded by non-supporting sites in their own pages." Another example of tradeoffs in providing an API. But an API-enabled Wikipedia would be a great data source. Will be interesting to see how this develops. [via Steve Rubel]